instinct, had recognised that Josephine
was in peril, and that may have been
what occasioned her sudden feverish haste
to get the child sent to Switzerland.
Sophia came out to meet us as we arrived.
Josephine, she said, had been taken by
ambulance to Market Basing General Hospital.
Dr. Gray would let them know as
soon as possible the result of the X-ray. r- '"How did it happen?" asked Taverner.
Sophia led the way round to the back of
the house and through a door into a small
disused yard. In one corner a door stood
ajar. -
"Tr's a kind of wash house," Sophialj
W,f
explained. "There's a cat hole cut in the
bottom of the door, and Josephine used to
stand on it and swing to and fro."
I remembered swinging on doors in my
own youth.
The wash house was small and rather
dark. There were wooden boxes in it, some
old hose pipe, a few derelict garden implements
and some broken furniture. Just
inside the door was a marble lion door stop.
"It's the door stop from the front door,"
Sophia explained. "It must have been
balanced on the top of the door."
Taverner reached up a hand to the top
of the door. It was a low door, the top of
it only about a foot above his head.
"A booby trap," he said.
He swung the door experimentally to and
fro. Then he stooped to the block of marble
but he did not touch it.
"Has anyone handled this?"
"No," said Sophia. "I wouldn't let any
one touch it."
"Quite right. Who found her?"
"I did. She didn't come in for her dinner
at one o'clock. Nannie was calling her.
She'd passed through the kitchen and out
into the stable yard about a quarter of an
hour before. Nannie said, 'She'll be bounc-
ing her ball or swinging on that door again.'
I said I'd fetch her in."
Sophia paused.
"She had a habit of playing in that way,
you said? Who knew about that?"
Sophia shrugged her shoulders.
"Pretty well everybody in the house, I
should think."
"Who else used the wash house? Gardeners?"
Sophia shook her head.
"Hardly anyone ever goes into it."
"And this little yard isn't overlooked
from the house?" Taverner summed it up.
"Anyone could have slipped out from the
house or round the front and fixed up that
trap ready. But it would be chancy ..."
He broke off, looking at the door, and
swinging it gently to and fro.
"Nothing certain about it. Hit or miss.
And likelier miss than hit. But she was
unlucky. With her it was hit."
Sophia shivered.
He peered at the floor. There were
various dents on it.
"Looks as though someone experimented
first M^. . to see just how it would fall. . .
The sound wouldn't carry to the house."
"No, we didn't hear anything. We'd no
., . .? ,i,- _/'ong until I came out
idea anything was wi^ ? , ?
/4 ^,,?/-i u i g face down -- all
and found her lyin^, . , , ,. ,
? 1^/4 ^ ?? o rAS voice broke a little.
sprawled out. Sophia, , . ?
"There was blood on ner nalr' . , "That her scarf?" ^raverner Pointed to a
checked woollen muf^ lymg on the floor> "Yes " Using the scarf he picked up the block
of marble carefully. . , ? , .,
"There mav be fi^rprmts, he said,
u
but he spoke withou ,., . ' r , ?
rather think whoever ^lr was - careful
He said to me: "Whac are you looking at?
t ,,roo i^^ ^ i,,roken backed wooden
I was looking at a V , , ,.
i^'^k^/.ko^ u-u as among the derelicts.
kitchen chair which w^ r r n
n^ tk^ o i- c ^ J^ a Iev fragments of On the seat of it wei^
"r'^^o '? ^ .Taverner. "Someone Curious, said . , ,, r . xr
ci-r^ri ^r, tko^ i, ifh muddy feet. Now
stood on that chair w
why was that?"
He shook his head.- , r i u
"w/^nr t,r^ . when you found her, What time was it
Miss Leonides?" p.
"Tt ^^ot i, i- ^n Ilve minutes past it must have be^ "
one."
"And your Nannie saw hergolng out
about twenty minuted earher- wh0 wasthe
la
in the wash house?"
"I've no idea. Probably Josephine herself.
Josephine was swinging on the door this
morning after breakfast, I know."
Taverner nodded.
"So between then and a quarter to one
someone set the trap. You say that bit of
marble is the door stop you use for the
front door? Any idea when that was
missing?"
Sophia shook her head.
"The door hasn't been propped open at
all to-day. It's been too cold."
"Any idea where everyone was all the
morning?" ?
"I went out for a walk. Eustace and
Josephine did lessons until half past twelve
? with a break at half past ten. Father 5 I
think, has been in the library all the
morning."
"Your mother?"
"She was just coming out of her bedroom
when I came in from my walk ? that was
about a quarter past twelve. She doesn't get
up very early."
We re-entered the house. I followed
Sophia to the library. Philip 5 looking white
and haggard, sat in his usual chair. Magda
crouched against his knees, crying quietly.
Sophia asked:
"Have they telephoned yet from the
hospital?"
Philip shook his head.
Magda sobbed:
"Why wouldn't they let me go with her?
My baby -- my funny ugly baby. And I
used to call her a changeling and make her
so angry. How could I be so cruel? And
now she'll die. I know she'll die."
"Hush, my dear," said Philip. "Hush."
I felt that I had no place in this family
scene of anxiety and grief. I withdrew
quietly and went to find Nannie. She was
sitting in the kitchen crying quietly.
"It's a judgement on me, Mr. Charles,
for the hard things I've been thinking. A
judgement, that's what it is."
I did not try and fathom her meaning.
"There's wickedness in this house. That's
what there is. I didn't wish to see it or
believe it. But seeing's believing. Somebody
killed the master and the same somebody
must have tried to kill Josephine."
"Why should they try and kill Josephine?"
Nannie removed a corner of her handkerchief
from her eye and gave me a shrewd
glance.
"You know well enough what she was
like, Mr. Charles. She liked to know things.
She was always like that, even as a tiny
thing. Used to hide under the dinner table
br />
and listen to the maids talking and then
she'd hold it over them. Made her feel
important. You see, she was passed over,
as it were, by the mistress. She wasn't a
handsome child, like the other two. She
was always a plain little thing. A changeling,
the mistress used to call her. I blame the
mistress for that, for it's my belief it turned
the child sour. But in a funny sort of way
she got her own back by finding out things
about people and letting them know she
knew them. But it isn't safe to do that
when there's a poisoner about!"
No, it hadn't been safe. And that brought
something else to my mind. I asked Nannie:
"Do you know where she kept a little black
book ? a notebook of some kind where
she used to write down things?"
"I know what you mean, Mr. Charles.
Very sly about it, she was. I've seen her
sucking her pencil and writing in the book
and sucking her pencil again. And 'don't
do that,' I'd say, 'you'll get lead poisoning'
and 'oh no, I shan't,' she said, 'because it
isn't really lead in a pencil. It's carbon,
though I don't see how that could be so,
for if you call a thing a lead pencil it stands
to reason that that's because there's lead in
'^ 5? It.
"You'd think so," I agreed. "But as a
matter of fact she was right." (Josephine
was always right!) "What about this notebook?
Do you know where she kept it?"
"I've no idea at all, sir. It was one of the
things she was sly about."
"She hadn't got it with her when she was found?"
"Oh no, Mr. Charles, there was no
notebook."
Had someone taken the notebook? Or
had she hidden it in her own room? The
idea came to me to look and see. I was not
sure which Josephine's room was, but as I
stood hesitating in the passage Taverner's
voice called me:
"Come in here," he said. "I'm in the
kid's room. Did you ever see such a
sight?"
I stepped over the threshold and stopped
dead.
The small room looked as though it had
been visited by a tornado. The drawers of
the chest of drawers were pulled out and
their contents scattered on the floor. The
niattress and bedding had been pulled from
the small bed. The rugs were tossed into
heaps. The chairs had been turned upside
down 5 the pictures taken down from the
wall, the photographs wrenched out of their
tfqi-ppO
"Good Lord," I exclaimed. "What was the big idea?" i
"What do you think?"
"Someone was looking for something."
"Exactly."
I looked round and whistled.
"But who on earth -- Surely nobody
could come in here and do all this and not
be heard -- or seen?"
"Why not? Mrs. Leonides spends the
morning in her bedroom doing her nails
and ringing up her friends on the telephone
and playing with her clothes. Philip sits in
the library browsing over books. The nurse
woman is in the kitchen peeling potatoes
and stringing beans. In a family that knows
each other's habits it would be easy enough.
And I'll tell you this. Anyone in the house
could have done our little job -- could have
set the trap for the child and wrecked her
room. But it was someone in a hurry? someone who hadn't the time to search
quietly."
"Anvone in the house, you say?"
"Yes, I've checked up. Everyone has
some time or other unaccounted for. Philip,
Magda, the nurse, your girl. The same
upstairs. Brenda spent most of the morning
alone. Laurence and Eustace had a half
hour break ? from ten thirty to eleven ?
you were with them part of that time ?
but not all of it. Miss de Haviland was
in the garden alone. Roger was in his
study."
"Only Clemency was in London at her
job."
"No, even she isn't out of it. She stayed
at home today with a headache ? she was
alone in her room having that headache.
Any of them ? any blinking one of them!
And I don't know which! I've no idea. If
I knew what they were looking for in
here ?"
His eyes went round the wrecked room.
"And if I knew whether they'd found
it
?1*-. ...
Something stirred in my brain ? a
memory ...
Taverner clinched it by asking me:
"What was the kid doing when you last
saw her?"
"Wait," I said.
?. I dashed out of the room and up the
stairs. I passed through the left hand door
and went up to the top floor. I pushed open
the door of the cistern room, mounted the
two steps and bending my head, since the
ceiling was low and sloping, I looked round
me.
Josephine had said when I asked her
what she was doing there that she was
"detecting."
I didn't see what there could be to detect
in a cobwebby attic full of water tanks. But
such an attic would make a good hiding
place. I considered it probable that Josephine
had been hiding something there, something that she knew quite well she had
no business to have. If so, it oughtn't to
take long to find it.
It took me just three minutes. Tucked
away behind the largest tank, from the
interior of which a sibilant hissing added
an eerie note to the atmosphere, I found a packet of letters wrapped in a torn piece of
brown paper.
I read the first letter.
Oh Laurence -- my darling, my own
dear love ... It was wonderful last
night when you quoted that verse of
t Vnpw it was meant for me,
though you didn't look at me. Aristide
said, "You read verse well." He didn't
guess what we were both feeling. My
darling, I feel convinced that soon
everything will come right. We shall be
glad that he never knew, that he died
happy. He's been good to me. I don't
want him to suffer. But I don't really
think that it can be any pleasure to live
after you're eighty. I shouldn't want to!
Soon we shall be together for always.
How wonderful it will be when I can
say to you: My dear dear husband
.... Dearest, we were made for each
other. I love you, love you, love you ?
I can see no end to our love, I ?
There was a good deal more, but I had
no wish to go on.
Grimly I went downstairs and thrust my
parcel into Taverner's hands.
"It's possible," I said, "that that's what
our unknown friend was looking for."
Taverner read a few passages, whistled
and shuffled through the various letters.
Then he looked at me with the e
xpression
of a cat who has been fed with the best
cream.
"Well," he said softly. "This pretty well
cooks Mrs. Brenda Leonides's goose. And
Mr. Laurence Brown's. So it was them, all
the time. ..."
Nineteen
It seems odd to me, looking back, how
suddenly and completely my pity and
sympathy for Brenda Leonides vanished
with the discovery of her letters, the letters
she had written to Laurence Brown. Was
my vanity unable to stand up to the
revelation that she loved Laurence Brown
with a doting and sugarly infatuation and
had deliberately lied to me? I don't know.
I'm not a psychologist. I prefer to believe
that it was the thought of the child
Josephine, struck down in ruthless self
preservation that dried up the springs of
my sympathy.
"Brown fixed that booby trap, if you ask
me," said Taverner, "and it explains what
puzzled me about it."
"What did puzzle you?"
"Well, it was such a sappy thing to do.
Look here, say the kid's got hold of these
letters -- letters that are absolutely damning! The first thing to do is to try and get
them back ? (after all, if the kid talks
about them, but has got nothing to show,
it can be put down as mere romancing) but
you can't get them back because you can't
find them. Then the only thing to do is to
put the kid out of action for good. You've
done one murder and you're not squeamish
about doing another. You know she's fond
of swinging on a door in a disused yard.
The ideal thing to do is wait behind the
door and lay her out as she comes through
with a poker, or an iron bar, or a nice bit
of hose-pipe. They're all there ready to
hand. Why fiddle about with a marble lion
perched on top of a door which is as likely
as not to miss her altogether and which
even if it does fall on her may not do the
job properly (which actually is how it turns
out)? I ask you ? why?"
"Well," I said, "what's the answer?"
"The only idea I got to begin with was
that it was intended to tie in with someone's
alibi. Somebody would have a nice fat alibi
for the time when Josephine was being
slugged. But that doesn't wash because, to
begin with, nobody seems to have any kind
of alibi, and secondly someone's bound to
look for the child at lunchtime, and they'll
find the booby trap and the marble b100^3
the whole modus operand! will be ^u1 e
plain to see. Of course, if the murder^
removed the block before the chiP was
found, then we might have been pu22 ,'
But as it is the whole thing just d068111
make sense."
He stretched out his hands. .,?
' ?"i
"And what's your present explanat^01
"The personal element. Personal id^05^"
crasy. Laurence Brown's idiosyncrasy- e
doesn't like violence ? he can't Iorce
himself to do physical violence. He [[i^ y
couldn't have stood behind the doo^ an
socked the kid on the head. He cou^ n^
-*- c f^f~^
up a booby trap and go away and n^1
it happen."
"Yes, I see," I said slowly. "It^. me
eserine in the insulin bottle all over a^^11'
"Exactly."
"Do you think he did that w^0^
Brenda's knowing?"
"It would explain why she didn't /throw
away the insulin bottle. Of course, y
/~T*
may have fixed it up between them ~^~. ,
she may have thought up the poison trlcK
all by herself ? a nice easy death fc^ er
tired old husband and all for the b^1 m
the best of possible worlds! But I b^ she
didn't fix the booby trap. Women never
have any faith in mechanical things working
properly. And are they right. I think myself
the eserine was her idea, but that she made
her besotted slave do the switch. She's the
kind that usually manages to avoid doing
anything equi vocable themselves. Then they
keep a nice happy conscience."
He paused then went on:
"With these letters I think the D.P.P.
will say we have a case. They'll take a bit
of explaining away! Then 5 if the kid gets
through all right everything in the garden
will be lovely." He gave me a sideways
glance. "How does it feel to be engaged to
about a million pounds sterling?"
I winced. In the excitement of the last
few hours, I had forgotten the developments
about the will.
"Sophia doesn't know yet," I said. "Do
you want me to tell her?"
"I understand Gaitskill is going to break
the sad (or glad) news after the inquest
tomorrow." Taverner paused and looked at
me thoughtfully.
"I wonder," he said, "what the reactions
will be from the family?"
Twenty
The inquest went off much as I had prophesied.
It was adjourned at the request of
the police.
We were in good spirits for news had
come through the night before from the
hospital that Josephine's injuries were much
less serious than had been feared and that
her recovery would be rapid. For the
moment. Dr. Gray said, she was to be
allowed no visitors -- not even her mother.
"Particularly not her mother," Sophia
murmured to me. "I made that quite clear
to Dr. Gray. Anyway, he knows Mother."
I must have looked rather doubtful for
Sophia said sharply:
"Why the disapproving look?"
"Well -- surely a mother --"
"I'm glad you've got a few nice old